"This is Abigail," says the farmer, pointing at a cow. "She's like a lovely soppy labrador. I used to pick her up and carry her around." Archaeologist Alex Langlands is impressed. "You've built up a real rapport," he says, peering at Abigail's matted cow hair and uncomprehending cow face. "Bless her. Wonderful. Yes. Ha, ha!" Wartime Farm (Thursday, 8pm, BBC2) is full of this sort of stuff. An eight-part tribute to the 1939-1945 pluck of our agricultural predecessors, it appears to have borrowed its MO from Abigail; draping its lovely soppy labradoriness over our slippers and nuzzling into our lap with its damp-nosed facts and historical bonhomie, even though it's actually a cow and, as such, has ruined the carpet.

Wartime Farm follows in the hobnailed footsteps of Victorian Farm and Edwardian Farm, hugely successful living history series in which Alex, fellow archaeologist Peter Ginn and historian Ruth Goodman recreated the past by immersing themselves in the minutiae of daily life. Not for them the frivolous, slap-my-muttonchops-and-call-me-Fanny fluffery of the likes of Turn Back Time: The High Street. Here instead was rural history red in tooth and claw: the failed harvests, the fruitless jam-making sessions, the straining sows. As the buggered ploughs and botched pottage mounted, any residual rose-tinted sentimentality flaked off like the skin of a psoriatic shire horse. "The past is a bastard," roared the subtext, "but never mind because here's how to make a blanket out of paper and lard." And so it is with Wartime Farm, a winning attempt to recreate a year in the life of a busy Hampshire farm as it struggled, thanklessly, through the second world war.

We arrive as autumn approaches from the lower fields. "What a beautiful place," gasps Peter, shivering slightly in his back-to-school tank top, surrounded by waddling geese and barns sporting those neat, thatched, hairdo-shaped roofs that make them look like outdoor Beatles. In the opening episode, Alex and Peter set about ploughing a waterlogged wheat field while Ruth fits an unpleasant new kitchen floor. Experts drop by to deliver advice on iron reclamation while looking faintly embarrassed in tweed caps. There are wartime facts of the "demands for increased productivity were such that the government instructed the nation's farmers to grow an additional six-and-a-half million acres of crops" genus. Scattered throughout are cutaways of undulating hills and stoic ruminants filming exterior shots of sheep against a backdrop of yawning bees. Dull? Not a bit. It's Wartime Farm's simplicity, its literalness, its anti-fashionableness that makes it so likable.

There are no orchestrated fall outs. No wry observations or whoops-a-daisy trombones to subvert the conceit for period lolz. There is unlikely to be a phone-in in episode five asking us to vote for the best wartime moustache, or a segment in which we're introduced to a new farmhand and it's Olly Murs and he's doing gun-fingers and talking about how his favourite bit in the second world war is, like, that bit with the beach. There are no journeys. Nobody gives it 110%. Instead, there is grumble-free manual labour, cheery make-doing and mending, chapped hands, pigs, a recipe for fried bananas, terrible trousers and genuine respect for the astonishing patience and fortitude of those who lived on, as Churchill put it, "the frontline of freedom". It's basically Blue Peter in a floral headscarf.

Wartime Farm's sincerity and enthusiasm will make you want to pick up Abigail, carry her to Television Centre and plonk her on the desk of BBC2 controller Janice Hadlow stapled to a note that says MORE OF THIS SORT OF THING PLEASE BECAUSE IT'S NOT AWFUL. But it's probably best to just keep calm and carry on watching.